1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an optical lens for image pickup, and more particularly to the optical lens for image pickup with a short total length and a low cost, and comprised of four lens elements and applied to electronic products.
2. Description of the Related Art
In compact electronic products such as digital still cameras and mobile phone cameras, an optical lens for image pickup is installed for capturing images of an object, and the optical lens for image pickup tends to be developed with a compact design and a low cost, while meeting the user requirements for high resolution and high image quality.
In general, a conventional optical lens for image pickup of a compact electronic product comes with different designs, including the two-lens, three-lens, four-lens, and five-or-more lens designs. If the image quality of a compact electronic product is taken into consideration, the optical lens for image pickup with a design of four lens elements or five lens elements has advantages on image aberration and modulation transfer function (MTF) performance, wherein the design with four lens element having less lenses than the design with five lens elements and a lower manufacturing cost is suitable for electronic products having the high quality and high pixel requirements.
In various optical lenses for image pickup with the four-lens design, the prior art adopts different combinations of positive and negative refractive powers, wherein the first lens element has positive refractive power, the second lens element has negative refractive power, the third lens element has positive refractive power, and the fourth lens element has negative refractive power as disclosed in WIPO Pat. No. WO2010026691 and U.S. publication and U.S. Pat. No. 7,785,023, 2008/180813, and U.S. Pat. No. 7,755,853 to provide a better aberration correction.
In products such as compact digital cameras, web cameras, and mobile phone cameras, the optical lens for image pickup requires a compact design, a short focal length, and a good aberration correction. In a design with the combination of the first lens element with positive refractive power, the second lens element with negative refractive power, the third lens element with positive refractive power, and the fourth lens element with positive refractive power, a compact requirement can be achieved most probably as disclosed in U.S. Pat. Nos. 7,443,611, 7,375,903 and 7,345,830. However, the optical lens for image pickup disclosed in these patents comprises the third lens element having a convex object side in proximity to the optical axis and turning into a concave shape at the edge of the lens, so that the curvature has a drastic change and a complicated shape, and it is relatively difficult to manufacture the lenses of this sort, which is unfavorable for production. In addition, the installation of the meniscus third lens element can correct the astigmatic field curving, and the meniscus third lens element has a shorter effective diameter and a greater curvature of the image-side surface to provide better positive refractive power and suppress the light effectively, so that there is a better flexibility for the installation space of the lenses. The difficulty of the cooling and deformation controls during the production of thicker second lens element and the longer total length of the lens can be overcome. Therefore, the present invention provides a practical design for shortening the optical lens for image pickup, while using four lenses with different refractive powers, and a combination of convex and concave optical surfaces, not only reducing the total length of the optical lens for image pickup, but also improving the image quality, reducing the manufacturing cost by using simple lenses, and applying the lenses for electronic products.